“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare The title gives the game away: David Owen, a failed British politician who was for three crucial years (1992-95) Europe’s chief negotiator on the issue of the former Yugoslavia, seeks to cast himself as a Homerian hero. After 400 pages of tedious and...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
Holland has a dirty little secret. In the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, there is a prison where you can be indefinitely incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad hoc “court” that sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests have been made. The court is ten...